Shakespearean Spring

The defeat of the first referendum on Québec sovereignty
in 1980 seemed to produce yet another explosion of theatrical
energy. The mood, however, had become less inward-looking and
more expansive, characterized by, in the words of critic
Robert Lévesque, "démesure," with its implications
of recklessness, and "générosité." Two
Shakespearean landmarks frame the decade: the six- part,
all-day Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux [Life and
Death of the Limping King] in 1981, and the "Printemps
Shakespeare" [Shakespearean Spring] of 1988.

The Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental, which in
1977 had produced Jean-Pierre Ronfard's Lear, in
1979-80 undertook a project they called "Shakespeare
Follies," a systematic study of the plays of Shakespeare
which was expected to culminate in a cabaret-style show to be
filled with Shakespearean characters (Godin and Lavoie 12).
What emerged instead was Ronfard's Roi Boiteux, a
massive canvas of six plays representing the dynastic
rivalries, over several generations and continents, of the
descendants of two Québec families. Ronfard's "bloody
and grotesque epic" (the subtitle of the second volume),
celebrates its ludic incoherence and inclusiveness. However,
the traces of Shakespeare that were its initial impulse
remain. Richard Premier, the Roi Boiteux, is of course, in
his disabled body, his dynastic ambitions, his moral
perversity and his murderousness, related to Shakespeare's
Richard III; his scion, the decrepit, wheelchair-bound,
feebleminded Filippo Ragone is a version of Ronfard's earlier
Lear. But just as the Roi Boiteux's body overflows its
boundaries, so does his identity, which in the rich
intertextuality of Ronfard's script, is repeatedly invaded by
echoes of Oedipus, Nero, Hamlet, Orestes, Agamemnon and
Odysseus, just to name a few. Ronfard's imagination refuses
to be contained by Shakespeare's, and his Shakespeare is
filtered through the carnivalized text of the Roi
Boiteux. But, he makes clear, without Shakespeare the
text would never have come into being or taken its final
form.

Towards the end of the decade, between March and May of 1988,
Shakespeare became the enfant chéri
[sweetheart] (Camerlain 5) of the Montreal stage. Three
audacious Shakespeares dominated the theatre season to great
acclaim: The Tempest (dir. Alice Ronfard,
Théâtre Expérimental des Femmes, at l'Espace
GO), A Midsummer Night's Dream (dir. Robert Lepage,
at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde), and the plays of
Shakespeare's second tetralogy (done as Le cycle des
rois, dir. Jean Asselin, Omnibus, at l"Espace Libre).
Their Shakespeare, deconstructed in postmodern and
dislocative stagings that took their own theatricality as
their subject, was no longer the Prince of Québec.

Alice Ronfard's Tempest filled the small space of
L'Espace GO with a huge sand pit representing the island and
three monumental video screens, leaving room for only 100
spectators. On the screens the projection of both documentary
footage and scenes from the production being performed
emphasized the nature of theatre as a site of image making.
The role of Prospero, played by a woman, was doubled by a
figure in modern dress called "The Actor," whose presence,
according to Gilbert David, encouraged "reflection on theatre
as the space of the Double" (David, "D'une saison" 60). [Link
to photo if permission.]

The set of Robert Lepage's Midsummer Night's Dream,
a rotating platform in the shape of Shakespeare's England,
similarly suggested an island that was the world that was the
stage, especially when the dizzying turns of events were
literally generated when Puck and the other actors got down
from the platform and pushed it to make it rotate. Its spiral
staircase filled the vertical height of the huge TNM stage,
and Meredith Caron's very baroque and highly praised
costumes, though they suggested an Elizabethan silhouette,
were deliberately and grotesquely overdone to suggest that
these were "play-acted" Elizabethans (who were playing
Athenians). [Link to photo if permission]

The set of the Cycle des rois, too, offered an image
of its world as a stage. The reflecting surfaces of its
angled side pieces, evoking the polygons of the Elizabethan
public theatre, multiplied the actors' images and returned to
the audience an image of itself. The costumes by Yvan Gaudin
(who received for them the prize of the Association
québécoise des critiques de théâtre) were
built from materials gathered in the second-hand shops of the
poor quarters of Montreal: old clothes, curtains,
bric-a-brac, and disused household appliances - an old
birdcage became a crown, a discarded film reel the spiraling
top of a bishop's crook. [Link to photo if permission] This
was a theatre made of its place and time, but no more
representing its own place and time than it represented
Shakespeare's.

By taking their own theatricality as their subject, these
productions were able to speak not only to Québec
audiences but to audiences elsewhere, especially abroad.
Reviewer Marianne Ackerman suggested that by the end of the
1980s francophone theatre artists in Québec had tired of
political questions: "After a period of creative
self-absorption, actors are keen to see the world, make a
splash abroad, and gain inspiration from over the horizon."